


the flowers in my ribcage are dead

by deathsweetqueen



Series: Tony Stark Bingo 2019: Round 2 [3]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Angst and Feels, Awesome Clint Barton, Awesome Natasha Romanov, Awesome Phil Coulson, BAMF Clint Barton, BAMF Natasha Romanov, BAMF Phil Coulson, BAMF Tony Stark, Bottom Tony Stark, Canon Divergence - Iron Man 1, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov Friendship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Foursome - F/M/M/M, Hurt Tony Stark, Iron Man 1, M/M, Moresomes, Multi, Other, Phil Coulson Has the Patience of a Saint, Protective Clint Barton, Protective Natasha Romanov, Protective Phil Coulson, Queerplatonic Relationships, Threesome - M/M/M, Tony Stark Does What He Wants, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Has A Heart, Tony Stark Has Issues, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Top Tony Stark, basically an agentironhawkwidow au of iron man, cause he's so tired, tony fucks things up and takes no shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 22:35:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17692388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathsweetqueen/pseuds/deathsweetqueen
Summary: Tony had mercy once, but it’s all gone now.His hands are stained with the splatters of Yinsen’s blood, a man who had no reason to die, whoshouldn’thave died, but died because he was protecting Tony, because he was giving Tony a chance to escape.So, how could he not kill all those men?He stalks forward, raining hellfire (quite literally, with his flamethrower) down on all of them, until he’s emerging out of the cave which he’s happy to say goodbye to.Hell, he’d torch it too, if he could.Written for the "cave" square (T2) for the Tony Stark Bingo 2019.





	the flowers in my ribcage are dead

**Author's Note:**

> As I said in the summary, this was written for the "cave" square for the Tony Stark Bingo 2019.
> 
> Just to clarify the relationships in this fic, there is an overall agentironhawkwidow going on, but the specific sexual relationships in that poly are agentironhawk, agenthawk and ironwidow, whereas I would say that Clint, Natasha and Phil together are in a queerplatonic relationship within the overall poly, if that makes sense.
> 
> The title of this fic comes from mavencalore's poem _cursebreaker_ , which can be found here: http://mavencalore.tumblr.com/post/145467033020/bride-of-spring-why-do-you-cry-i-i-hate-their.

Tony had mercy once, but it’s all gone now.

His hands are stained with the splatters of Yinsen’s blood, a man who had no reason to die, who _shouldn’t_ have died, but died because he was protecting Tony, because he was giving _Tony_ a chance to escape.

So, how could he _not_ kill all those men?

He stalks forward, raining hellfire (quite literally, with his flamethrower) down on all of them, until he’s emerging out of the cave which he’s happy to say goodbye to.

Hell, he’d torch it too, if he could.

He has to give it to the men; they’re brave. They try and stop him valiantly (although, he doubts anything they do could ever be termed _valiant_ ), but they all go down like a sack of potatoes by the time he’s done with them. He aims his flamethrower at the hoard of weapons they’ve collected for themselves, these things that he made to protect the soldiers of his country, to protect Phil and Clint and Tasha, to protect Rhodey and Pepper and Happy, which they’ve used to torture and threaten and beat down innocent people.

No, they don’t get to keep them; they don’t get to use him as their warmonger anymore.

Instead, he blows the whole thing to kingdom come.

* * *

He lands in the desert with a crash.

His entire body aches, and it fucking sucks, as he pulls off every scrap and plate of the armour, opening up his eyes to the strong, blistering heat of the sun for the first time in three months.

God, he forgot how much the sun sucked.

He climbs out of the wreckage, stumbling to his feet and narrowly avoiding tripping over everything that’s streaked across the desert sand.

It’s a long walk ahead and he thanks whatever higher power there may be that Yinsen thought to wrap his feet up before he got inside the armour; otherwise, this would be an even greater hell than it already is.

He’s crossing the crest of a dune when the familiar throb of chopper blades makes his head ache. He looks up and sees the roll of propellers and thinks he might start crying.

Rhodey jumps out once the helicopter lands. Tony could pick him out of any crowd, and the fact that he’s covered from head to toe to protect him from the sun doesn’t diminish that in any way.

“How was the fun-vee?” Rhodey teases, approaching him, slowly, like he’s a wounded kitten.

Tony huffs out a laugh. “Go fuck yourself. You’re not funny.”

Rhodey sighs. “All that attitude, and after I stalked you through a whole desert for three months.”

“Three months? Sounds like someone’s obsessed,” Tony sings.

Rhodey rolls his eyes and falls to his knees in front of Tony. His warm palm settles on the back of Tony’s neck.

“Next time, you ride with me, huh?”

Tony nods, a little stunted movement born out of his desire to not open his mouth, lest he start crying like a toddler.

“You might need to start an anti-aging regimen, honeybear. You’re getting a little wrinkly there,” he says, instead.

“Fuck you, and after I dragged your harem out here with me.” Rhodey shakes his head.

_Harem, what?_

“I’m offended, James,” Natasha drawls, stepping up. “You came with us, remember? Not the other way around.” She wraps her arms around Tony’s shoulders and helps him to his feet.

“Tasha,” he mutters into her neck.

She smells like blood and talcum powder and he doesn’t think he’s ever loved her more.

“Antoshka,” she murmurs, kissing him on his grimy, sweat-stained hair all sneakily.

“Woah, who’s this corpse?”

“Fuck you, Barton,” Tony grumbles, stumbling forward, with Natasha’s arm around his shoulders and Rhodey’s arm around his waist.

Clint laughs and suddenly, he’s being kissed within an inch of his life. Tony stares into his dark blue eyes and his throat closes him, his heart lurching in whatever remains of his chest cavity.

Clint runs his thumb over the dark bruises underlining his eyes, fondly.

“S’okay, Tony,” he says, gently. “You’re safe now. We got you, baby.”

Tony opens his mouth to say something ( _I love you, I missed you, thank you_ ), but his tongue stops working.

Clint takes pity on him. “We know, baby. We love you too.”

Tony nods, like he’s completely wasted, and just lets them drag him over to the helicopter. He knows these three so well, like the back of his hand, that he knows immediately when someone else, not one of the three, lifts him up into the helicopter.

“Phil,” he breathes, when his eyes meet another set of kind, blue eyes.

Phil smooths his hair back. “We have you, Tony,” he rumbles.

He just nods, and lets all of them wrap their arms around him.

* * *

There’s nothing but silence in the car when they return from the press conference. Pepper stays back to collect some paperwork for him, Happy remaining with her, so Clint decides to drive them home. Natasha is cluttered against her side of the backseat, watching every car that passes by like it could explode or assassins could surge out of the windows and shoot them down in a splatter of blood.

They haven’t said a word to him since his perhaps reckless declaration at the press conference and he waits there, with a knot in his throat, hoping that this isn’t the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Finally, he sighs.

Patience has never been a good friend to him.

“If you’re going to say something, you might as well say it now. No one can hear us,” he says, reluctantly, determinedly staring somewhere where he won’t be caught in the rat trap that is their gaze.

Natasha looks at him, her expression unfathomable. “What makes you think we want to say something?” she drawls.

He scowls at her, in a whirlwind of irritation. “Don’t do that,” he warns, his voice like stone, harsh and brittle. “Don’t do that Black Widow psychoanalysing thing with me. I’m not one of your targets, Tasha, and I’ve had a fucked-up couple of months, so I’m not in the fucking mood. You got something to say to me, _any of you_ , you say it straight to my face. None of this agent double speak, understand?”

“Tony,” Phil begins, soothingly, like he’s a wounded kitten that needs to be petted and coddled.

“What, Phil? _What_?”

“Hey, don’t get angry at us because _you’re_ freaking out over what you just did, okay,” Clint snaps at him from the driver’s seat.

The words hit Tony like a blow to the stomach and he deflates, curling in on himself. He pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head.

“Sorry, I’m sorry. I know, I’m taking all this shit out on you, and I shouldn’t be. I’m sorry.”

Natasha clucks her tongue and reaches for him, sliding her long, pale, elegant fingers into his hair, scraping her nails against his scalp.

“It’s okay, Antoshka,” she murmurs against the shell of his ear. “We are so proud of you, aren’t we, boys?”

Phil’s hand grips Tony’s thigh, grounding him to the spot. “We are,” he agrees, solidly. “What you did today was so brave, honey.”

“Yeah, you slayed, babe. You should’ve seen Stane’s face. He looked like someone had emptied his entire bank account,” Clint says, gleefully.

Tony snorts. “I don’t know why you’re so mean to him.”

Clint shrugs. “He’s creepy as fuck,” he says, calmly, like it’s a bare, essential fact of the universe. “I can’t help myself.”

Tony sighs. They’ve had this very argument a hundred times, and Tony doesn’t foresee a dramatic change in his lovers’ attitudes, even if he just spent three months trapped in a cave with terrorists who would’ve tried their fucking best to leave him there a bloody, mutilated corpse.

“He’s not so bad,” he says, weakly.

Natasha snorts. “He looks at you like he’s hungry, Antoshka,” she hums. “Like he wants to take bites of you until there’s nothing left.”

“Clint, Natasha,” Phil says, carefully, ever the mediator in their motley couple. “Maybe this isn’t the best time for this conversation.”

“Yes, sir,” both intone, sheepishly, but through their eyelashes so no one will take anything that’s said seriously.

“Tony,” Phil begins, running his thumb over the little dip in his kneecap. “We didn’t mean to offend you. We’re just concerned, and Stane… rubs us up the wrong way, but we won’t talk about it anymore if it’s going to bother you.”

“Thank you,” Tony says, softly. “I know you mean it in a good way, but Obie’s all I have left of my family.” He shrugs. “I mean, after my parents died, he really stuck with me the whole way through, you know. I don’t know what I’d be without him.”

Tony watches as Phil’s face changes, just fleetingly, a little tightening of the lines around his mouth. He knows there’s more there. Phil is a little quieter of his disdain for Obie, but it just brims under the surface, waiting to let loose; Phil is smart. He’s waiting for a good time, for when he has Obie under the knife for whatever imagined sins the three agents have come up with.

Tony should open his mouth, defend his godfather, because what can they possibly know? Yes, they kiss him and they tell him they love him and they sleep in his bed and they fuck him, but they haven’t been there for the bad times, when he was drunk and stoned and everyone thought he’d die choking in a pool of his own vomit.

Obie was, though.

And maybe he hasn’t always agreed with the choices that Obie made, regarding him, regarding his company, he’s always been grateful for Obie _staying_.

He should be saying all of this to them, these strangers who can’t (who may never) understand, but he doesn’t say anything.

He remembers, in stunning technicolour, the hungry, haunted look in his godfather’s eyes when he demanded Tony show him the arc reactor in his chest, the way his stubby fingers pressed against the rim, like he owned him, and how it made his stomach roll.

So, he keeps his mouth shut.

* * *

They’re waiting for him when he comes back from Gulmira, standing in a sedate line in his workshop, their arms folded across their chests with equally unimpressed glints in their eyes.

JARVIS pulls him out of his armour with absolutely no tenderness whatsoever.

“I can explain _everything_ ,” he insists, jumping down onto the floor.

“I doubt that. I really do,” Phil drawls, coldly.

Tony runs a hand through his sweat-matted hair. “It’s not as serious as you’re making it look.”

“You aren’t helping your case here,” Natasha snaps.

“Don’t get snippy with me, missy,” Tony retorts. “The three of you go on dangerous, potentially fatal missions all the time for fucking SHIELD and you don’t tell me where you’re going or what you’re doing or where to pick your corpses up from if you _die_ , yet I’m supposed to constantly spill my guts out to you. How is that fair?”

Clint scowls. “Maybe because we’re actual secret agents, you dumbass, and we didn’t decide to go into a warzone with experimental weaponry and pick a fight with a bunch of terrorists and the fucking United States Air Force.”

Tony rolls his eyes. “First of all, it wasn’t _experimental_ weaponry. I’ve used it before. Second, I picked a fight with a bunch of terrorists that kidnapped me for three months, killed my friend and his entire family and was terrorising an innocent village full of innocent people. I think I’m justified. Third, I didn’t pick a fight with the _entire_ United States Air Force. Just… a few of them.”

Phil sighs. “Tony.”

“Oh, don’t give me that whole _you did something stupid, so now I have to explain how you did something stupid like you’re fucking four_ tone,” Tony growls. “I’m not a fucking child, and I’m not a fucking civilian, not anymore. Until the three of you can treat me like a fucking adult with the same amount of respect you give each other, there’s nothing left to talk about, okay?”

He storms out of the workshop, ignoring their calls after him.

* * *

He stumbles into the shower and takes a seat on the little bench he built for himself into the wall, so that he can still get clean, while staying out of the spray’s rampage, which had promptly triggered a whirlwind of a panic attack when he had first come back home.

He leaves impressions of his nails in his thigh at the mere memory.

The shower door opens with a slick little sound of the glass giving away.

“I _said_ , I didn’t want to talk,” he snaps. “That kind of implies that you shouldn’t follow me either.”

Natasha rolls her eyes and plants herself against the inside of the glass, her hair growing wet quickly.

“Well, if you really didn’t want us coming after you, you would’ve made sure JARVIS wouldn’t let us inside your room,” she points out.

She takes a step forward, dunking herself under the shower spray, until her hair starts to curl down her back. She runs her fingers through it, untangling the knots, and pulling it over her shoulder once she’s done.

“I’d ask you to shampoo me, but I don’t think you’d oblige me,” she says, blithely.

Honestly, he would, if could. He loved the moments where Natasha would cross her legs and sit down on the shower floor in front of him and tip her head back for him to massage the shampoo through. But now, he thinks if the water drips onto his arm long enough, he might suffocate.

“Sorry,” he says, gently.

Natasha gives him a smile, toothy but soft. “It’s okay, Tony.”

She boldly strides forward, settling on his lap with a bit of a wiggle. To stabilise both of them, he grips her hip, thumb slotting into the dip of her pelvic bone, while one palms her bare breast. Natasha sighs and slants her hands on his shoulders, pressing herself against him.

“Did you seriously come in here to seduce me?” he asks, curiously.

Natasha gives him a lazy look. “Is it working?” she teases.

Tony cants his hip up, so that she can feel the press of his hard cock against the crease between her thigh and hip. She bites her lip and her eyes go hot.

“I think you know already,” he rasps.

“I missed you,” she says, gently, running a damp hand through his hair, not wet enough that it throws him for a loop.

Tony softens, warmth unfurling in the pit of his stomach, his anger deflating. “I missed you too,” he says, wearily.

“I would’ve killed them all,” she swears, leaning in to press their foreheads together. “ _Three months._ ” She goes taut like piano wire. “You were gone for three months and logic dictated you hadn’t survived the first week.” She grits her teeth and looks away so he can’t see how haunted this entire miserable event has made her.

Tony clutches at her, pulling her close, and traces the curve of her spine. “I missed you like hell,” he says, solemnly.

Natasha nods, shakily, in the shuddering stillness that hangs in the air. “I want to make love with you,” she says, steadily. “Can we have sex?”

Tony brushes a stray red curl out of her eyes. “Are you sure?”

He’d be lying if he said he didn’t want to bury himself inside this beautiful, fierce woman and let the world pass him by.

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Tony leans in and kisses her gently, slanting his mouth over hers, until she’s mewling. She curls her body against his, their pieces fitting together like a puzzle. She hefts herself against him, slipping a long-fingered, elegant hand between their bodies and wrapping around his cock, giving him a lazy, upward stroke until he’s moaning _Natasha_ in his ear.

She grins like she’s unburdened of everything and fists his cock, until she can bear down on him, taking him in right until the base. He almost jolts away in the first moment, convinced she isn’t ready for him, she isn’t wet enough or stretched enough, but the breathy moan that she gifts him with and the scowl that unfurls on her face when he voices his concerns is enough for him to change his mind.

“Did you miss me, Antoshka?” she sighs, taking him inside her, her tits bouncing.

Tony swallows hard against the feeling of her hot body writhing in his lap, the cloying scent of sex mixing in with the steam.

“I missed you,” he says, roughly. “God, I missed you. I thought about you every day and every night.”

Natasha clutches at his shoulders and rocks on top of him until he can wind a hand between their bodies, towards her spread things, and rub slow circles on her clit. The orgasm crashes over her and she whines, a high, grating sound, clenching around him again and again. The fluttering aftershock of her inner muscles is enough to undo him, and he comes like a train wreck, leaving handprints etched into the curve of her hip.

He slumps back against the tile, winded.

She cups his face in her hands. “You will never leave me again, do you understand?” she says, in a firm, no-nonsense tone. “You will never let me think you are dead ever again.”

He pulls her in close and kisses her shoulder.

And if she decides to nuzzle into his neck until he carries her out of the shower like she’s precious, well, only the two of them know what happens.

* * *

That night, he’s lying in bed, when Phil and Clint join him, crawling under the sheets.

“Can we join you?” Phil asks, in a hushed voice, crouching by the side of the bed.

Tony licks his lips and pats the empty space beside him. “Go ahead,” he slurs.

Sleep doesn’t come to him easily nowadays, not with this fusion reactor lodged inside his chest cavity.

Clint slips in behind him, while Phil takes the space in front. Clint hovers over him for a brief moment, kissing him gently on the hair.

“You were so brave today, honey,” he murmurs, covering the slope of Tony’s hip over his sweats with his warm palm.

Tony hums his thanks, hand reaching behind him to scratch with blunt rails through Clint’s short blonde hair.

Fingers dip inside the waistband. “We’d like to show our appreciation,” Phil murmurs. “Can we?”

Tony pauses in a second, lingering in that state between sleep and consciousness, before the heat trickles under his skin. He licks his lips, and the two agents shuffle closer. Clint’s hand wraps around his cock, while the length of his own rubs up against Tony’s arse. In front, Phil kisses him, dirty and deep and wet, grinding up against him.

He’s sleepy and getting on in years, so the orgasm comes quickly to him. It’s less earth-shattering than the one with Natasha in the shower, but no less satisfying, turning his bones to liquid. They come just as quickly, leaving sticky stains on their clothes and the bedding, and Tony _should_ go and change and maybe toss the sheets for wash, but he doesn’t think he could drag himself away from the comfortable embrace of his lovers right now, not when they wrap themselves around him like an octopus and Clint starts muttering bad jokes in his ear that make him shake with laughter.

Just in case, they strip the bed and strip themselves, preferring to lie on the bare mattress.

Tony doesn’t even miss the thread count.

* * *

“Do you really think that just because you have an idea, it belongs to you?” Obadiah growls in his ear, his smile toothy and too sharp at the edges to be anything remotely resembling kind.

Tony’s a blur of half-formed thoughts, flickering between Obadiah’s looming figure, his hateful face, his words that make Tony feel like shit, and the hand currently cleaving its way through his chest cavity and curling around heart muscle, rubbing the slick flesh that makes Tony erupt into agony.

Everything he ever said in Obadiah’s defence, to Clint, Phil and Natasha, to Rhodey, feels like the biggest and sickest joke of his life, sitting here on this couch in his home, while his godfather, a man he though he loved and was loved by, goes about killing him.

Obadiah shouts suddenly and hits the ground. Tony can’t quite see what’s happening, but his heart patters like a hummingbird, when Natasha looms into view, settling on top of Obadiah with a punishing grip around his neck with a knife poised to rip into the artery and spill his blood all over Tony’s nice carpet.

Two minutes later, Tony slumps down onto the floor in a heap, as the knot in his throat and in his lungs and in his heart burns like his world is erupting into fire.

_Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I’m going to die._

An arc reactor looms into his vision.

He looks up and Phil is standing over him, solemnly.

“May I?” Phil gestures to the gaping hole in his chest.

Tony can’t really open his mouth to say yes. The sweat prickles on the back of his neck.

Finally, he nods.

Phil gets a look in his eyes, all unbearably soft. He kneels in front of Tony and presses the reactor inside the empty chamber, which slides in with a click.

There’s a rush of blood in his ears and there’s a noise that comes out of him that sounds like a high, grating whine when the knots loosen and he can finally breathe without wanting to throw up the contents of his chest cavity onto the floor.

“Tony. Tony?”

Phil grips his jaw and peers into his eyes, clearly searching for something. Tony’s tongue is stuck to the roof of his mouth, so he can’t reassure Phil, tell him that everything’s working as it should be, but he can’t quite bring himself to speak.

Finally, Phil sees what he needs to see.

“You’re doing fine, honey,” he soothes.

Tony nods, shaking head to foot. It takes him a while, with his arms and legs all fuzzy and heavy like stone, but he manages to climb onto the sofa once more, leaning back. He runs a hand

Clint approaches them. “Hey, baby, how are you feeling?” he asks, smoothing his hand over Tony’s hair.

“Fuck you,” Tony wheezes, with no heat.

Clint laughs. “You’re gonna be just okay.”

He drapes Tony’s cheek with a warm palm and Tony raises his own hand to cover it. Tony’s eyes dart to where Natasha is still crouching over Obadiah’s body, muttering unintelligible threats in Russian, before she jumps to her feet, her sharp smile all threat. She storms over to him and settles in his lap without a second thought.

“I’d burn the whole world to the ground to protect you, understand?” she demands, nails digging into his shoulders. “I will kill him now. I will rend the flesh from his bones, and then I will kill him.”

Tony feels like he’s missing his skin, with the way she looks at him, but nods, falling into sweet muzzy exhaustion but knowing that she and the two men in this room would put themselves between him and anything else that came for him.

“Good,” Natasha says, satisfied, and kisses him swiftly over the defined bone in his cheek.

She turns around in his lab, to where Clint approaches Obadiah, who’s quickly fallen into the depth of unconsciousness.

“Rise and shine, fuckbag.” Clint kicks Obadiah in the ribs, none too gently.

Obadiah groans and cringes away from Clint, clutching at the bleeding arrow wound in his shoulder.

“Here’s how this works. We work for SHIELD, government agency, you might have heard of us. Well, the director really, really likes us, even though he’s a hardass and he doesn’t like to expose all the warm and fuzzies we know he feels. So, basically, we’re going to beat the shit out of you and then, we’re going to kill you, maybe dump your body or something, whichever makes shit real simple. Or maybe we’ll chop you up and through you in a woodchipper, make it rain Obadiah Stane. No one’s going to give a shit because technically we don’t exist, and we know how to make sure your death isn’t all that suspicious. The red, scary one, the one in your godson’s lap, who put a knife against your throat. Well, she’s an actual Russian assassin and real good at torture. I used to be in the circus, and I was a merc for hire, so I’ve seen some really fucked-up shit. Oh, and don’t underestimate the suit over here either. He just looks plain, but he’s freakishly good with a knife and he’s gagging to show you how much.”

Obadiah looks at Tony, his eyes bloodshot. “Tony,” he groans, reaching out his uninjured arm.

Clint breaks it without a change in an expression, his foot landing hard on Obadiah’s forearm, who screams.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ talk to him, you piece of shit.”

Tony doesn’t think he’s ever seen Clint like this, a blur of horrid instinct. He should help Obadiah; he _should_ , if he remembers the man who brought him birthday presents and sweets and gave a shit when his own father didn’t.

But then he also remembers the hungry look in his eyes when he sets eyes on the arc reactor in Tony’s chest for the first time, when he pulls it from his chest, ready to leave Tony here to die.

_Let him burn_ , he decides.

Natasha slides out of his lap with all the grace of a panther.

“Why don’t you get out of here, baby?” Clint calls out, without taking his eyes off Obadiah. “We’ll take care of this from here, huh. We’ll come up when we’re done.”

He turns to him then, gives him a lovesick look that Tony associates with him bringing Tony pizza topped with artichokes in his workshop when he’s on a bender, or makes him stupidly-shaped pancakes, or when he takes that silly pizza dog for a walk.

“S’okay, baby,” he reassures, in a firm, no-nonsense tone. “Everything’s going to be just fine.”

Phil holds out a hand. “Come on, Tony, I’ll take you upstairs.”

“No.”

They all look at him with surprise.

Tony climbs to his feet. “I have to go and fix shit at SI. You take care of things here.”

“Tony-” Phil begins to protest.

Tony shakes his head, lets the resolve settle in his bones. “No. No, I don’t have the luxury of relaxing now. I have to fix everything that Stane fucked up, everything I let him fuck up, and that starts with making sure Pepper’s okay.”

All three look dubious.

Tony sighs. “This is _my_ fight, guys. I’ll be back, I promise,” he says, earnestly. “ _I_ have to fix this. I’m the only one who can; so, let me fix this.”

“Tony,” Natasha begins, softly. “This isn’t your fault.”

“Yeah, yeah, it is,” Tony grits out. “ _He_ is not the sum total of my life, but that doesn’t mean he gets to win, that he gets to ruin everything I have tried to build since I was twenty-one. I’m the CEO of Stark Industries; livelihoods depend on me. I won’t-I _won’t_ let them down. I won’t let them pay for my mistakes, because I trusted in the wrong person. I’m fixing this.”

Phil shakes his head. “We can’t just let you go. We don’t know how many people are in Stane’s web, Tony. Any one of them could be waiting for you,” he argues.

“I need you to respect my decision, Phil,” Tony says, gently. “We talked about this, remember? I’m trusting you to do what’s necessary to take care of him, but I need you to trust me to put everything back together again. This is _my_ fight, not yours.”

Clint stares at him for a moment and smiles a little, like he knows in his bones who Tony Stark is. “Go.”

_You want respect? This is how you get it._

“Tony,” Obadiah begs, reaching out for him one last time, when the three circle him like vultures debating the best way to eat up their prey.

Tony stares down at him and can only think of what a fool this man has made of him.

“No.”

And he leaves him there, to the mercy of three out of the four people he loves most in the world.

_Let him burn._


End file.
